SMBs Getting Hammered by New Threats

Phishing and spyware are hammering medium to small businesses, according to a

new study.

”Medium and smaller businesses have lower access to expertise,” says

Bob Hansmann, a senior manager for Trend Micro, Inc., a security company

based in Tokyo and with U.S. headquarters in Cuptertino, Calif. ”The

greater access you have to expertise, the better prepared you are.

Otherwise, there might be someone in the company who reads up on it and

runs with the first solution they come across so they can move on to the

next problem.”

The study, which was done by Trend Micro, shows that organizations

lacking IT departments are clearly experiencing increasing problems with

security threats — from spam to spyware to phishing. For respondents

from small- and medium-sized businesses that have IT support, 38 percent

in the United States; 30 percent in Japan, and 44 percent in Germany said

they had contacted IT about a security concern or breach within the past

three months.

The findings spotlight the challenge smaller organizations face in

scaling IT resources to provide technical advice, conduct system scans,

clean machines manually, deploy patches and security policies, and

educate staff in order to enable a secure working environment, according

to Trend Micro analysts.

Hansmann, in a one-on-one interview with eSecurityPlanet, notes

that the study also shows that 46 percent of small to medium business

customers reported having problems with spyware, while 35 percent of

enterprise customers reported the same. Hansmann also notes that these

numbers closely correlate with the statistics that show that 54 percent

of small- and medium-sized businesses have an IT staff, while 91 percent

of enterprise customers have their own staffs.

But Hansmann says there’s another aspect to spyware and phishing that is

making the threats harder to deal with.

”It’s the newness of the problem,” he explains. ”These are emerging

threats. The old problems, like viruses and even spam, have been around

for a while. But the new problems that are only about a year old… it

contributes to the expertise problem. The problems are new. The solutions

are new. They don’t have experts in house.”

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